Opinion Cambridge Analytica - "You are what you like"

S

Smarty

Guest
There have been several articles in the past year about Cambridge Analytica and how they are the tool of psychological warfare, but none have been so in-depth as the effort made by the joint operation of The Guardian and The Observer to lay it bare. It helps that a certain key employee is now whistle blower.

Here's a brief run-down:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/17/facebook-cambridge-analytica-kogan-data-algorithm

And here an in-depth article with the whistle blower who worked for CA:

https://www.theguardian.com/news/20...er-christopher-wylie-faceook-nix-bannon-trump

To summarize, CA (heavily invested by billionaire Mercer) have been harvesting and analyzing about 50 million US accounts for likes, way past the 30-something thousand they had clearance for from FB "for research purposes" (the data was collected from a panel who consented in participation, but all their friend connections have also been data mined without anyone's approval). By assessing the likes they were able to build up very detailed personal profiles, and this data has subsequently been used for personally targeted add campaigns of yet unknown scales. For the US elections, key states were targeted (but make no mistake, they have collected data well beyond them) and for Brexit, they are expected to have tilted the opinion in favor of Leave. I would not be surprised if elections elsewhere have also been victim - Cambridge Analytics is a commercial enterprise and happy to sell to whomever is buying.

Facebook was pivotal in this plot - they have provided the platform for data collection as well as targeted advertising, although you could argue that this was without their explicit consent. However, they should not be given a free pass - they have consistently downplayed their role again and again, and they have failed to meet any obligations concerning reporting data breaches to their customers. They knew, and did not care.

I know there are some conspiracy cranks on this forum, but man, this mind control scheme must have all your senses tingling.

There is enough reason to believe that the 'dark ads' are an effective persuasion method:

https://www.theguardian.com/technol...ds-can-swing-opinions-politics-research-shows

FB have taken the step of throwing CA from their platform (last week, instead of when it was happening). The whistle blower wants to start undoing the damage somehow, and, well, blowing the whistle was his first step.

The whole story just wants to make me unplug from anything social media in disgust. I somewhat feel lucky that I hardly did anything more on FB than subscribing, and now I think there is little more to do than suspend the entire account. But I'm not as dependent on it for my social contacts as others, and the gap may be more difficult to bridge for those invested a lot of time and care into upholding relations in it.

So, the question - what are you going to do? Would you ditch Facebook, or other susceptible platforms like YouTube or Twitter, or stay? Do you even care? Do you see ways to get rid of these hive mind kind of activities on the net? Or do you think you can withstand the add pressure, or see through it?
 
Last edited by a moderator:

Nocturne

Friendly Tyrant
Forum Staff
Admin
I've been following CA for some time. It's fascinating and scary stuff... The recent problems in Kenya and the initial overturned final ballot by the supreme high court all seems to have stemmed from the interference of CA: https://businesstoday.co.ke/role-cambridge-analytica-play-kenyas-elections/ The upshot of this is that Facebook closed the official CA account: https://www.the-star.co.ke/news/201...ed-cambridge-analytica-for-violation_c1731658

Cambridge Analytics is a commercial enterprise and happy to sell to whomever is buying
I'm not so sure about that... I think they have a definite political agenda, and can't help but feel that if someone like Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn tried to enlist their services they'd be told "no"... When I see names like Steve Bannon linked to the group, then it seems obvious to me that their goal is probably to destabilize government as much as possible so the Ayn Rand cronies can feast on the rotting remains.

So, the question - what are you going to do? Would you ditch Facebook, or other susceptible platforms like YouTube or Twitter, or stay? Do you even care? Do you see ways to get rid of these hive mind kind of activities on the 'net? Or do you think you can withstand the add pressure, or see through it?
Personally, I keep my Facebook account closed to the public and generally don't "like" anything... but I honestly wouldn't have a problem with never using FB ever again. The only reason I maintain it is to keep my Nocturne Games page live and to follow a few close friends.

Also, it was interesting to see how Macron in the French general elections fought against them and their techniques (and won): https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017...ning-why-macron-succeeded-and-clinton-failed/ So there are methods and ways to fight this kind of thing. Although I honestly think that general awareness of the potential for manipulation should be enough to negate a lot of the methods that CA uses.

I know there are some conspiracy cranks on this forum, but man, this mind control scheme must have all your senses tingling.
lol! I must say, that as a sceptic of almost all conspiranoias over the years, I am firmly behind this one and think that the evidence that is available goes waaaaaaay beyond simple conspiranoia and into the realms of hard truth...
 
Stuff like this is what worries me most about AI. People joke about killer robots murdering everybody, but I think we're more likely to be gently ruled by a mountain of bull💩💩💩💩 information and propaganda churned out at an impossible rate by hyper intelligent AI with 10 million human life time's worth of machine learning to draw from.

People are so easily swayed by basic 💩💩💩💩 like this - I don't see how any sort of real democracy is going to be kept alive when AI gets stronger, unless we develop AI specifically to fight this sort of thing. Who's going to win that sort of war, though? Philanthropic hobbyists and academics, or scummy billionaires and enemy states?

Things are going to get really interesting in the next few decades. Throwing away your Facebook account isn't going to save you. Every piece of news on the planet is going to be mutilated, obfuscated, and fabricated by machines with more processing power than any human mind that's ever existed. And the general moronic public is going to love it, if the last few years have taught us anything.

Somebody get working on the neural implants, quick! Our pathetic meat brains are going to need all the help they can get! :'D
 
Last edited:
Z

zendraw

Guest
its just mind pushing stuff, who cares, if your well integrated in urself u just ditch whatever is not convenient to you and continue, even if that means u dont get a certain pleasure or w/e. like entartainment from youtube. i havent had a facebook for perhaps 5 years, nor any other social media accounts apart from forums for software that i use like game maker blender gimp i think etc. and discord. and just becouse some1 tryes to sell you somthing doesnt mean ur brainwashed if you buy it. you just might need what hes selling. you just ahve to know what you really want and need. i think every1 shuld just be glad we dont live in times where they physically push you to buy what theyr selling. otherwise its ok, to a some degree.
ignorrance from overload of information can be and is very dangerous. that is what scares me more then some ads.
what i mean by ignorrance from overload of info is, 99% of the information you get is just crap to keep you away from the 1% that has actual value. like a babe strippin infront of you while your car goes down the hill and some thief pickpockets you. be mindful of where your attention is.
 
S

Smarty

Guest
'm not so sure about that... I think they have a definite political agenda, and can't help but feel that if someone like Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn tried to enlist their services they'd be told "no"... When I see names like Steve Bannon linked to the group, then it seems obvious to me that their goal is probably to destabilize government as much as possible so the Ayn Rand cronies can feast on the rotting remains.
I agree that they certainly aren't impartial to their homelands (it's no secret that Mercer and Bannon are, to say the least, right-leaning, and indeed CA itself is a British company so it may have interests there), but I think they're very unlikely to care for dwarf states that aren't part of the kind of cross-country unions they oppose - companies do need to sustain a cash flow. But I also like to believe that more liberal parties would feel morally opposed to using targeted advertising, at least the tactics to bombard potential voters with disinformation.

Also, it was interesting to see how Macron in the French general elections fought against them and their techniques (and won): https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017...ning-why-macron-succeeded-and-clinton-failed/ So there are methods and ways to fight this kind of thing. Although I honestly think that general awareness of the potential for manipulation should be enough to negate a lot of the methods that CA uses.
I agree, though I feel that liberal parties elsewhere are slow to pick up the pace, maybe too slow to undo the damage.

lol! I must say, that as a sceptic of almost all conspiranoias over the years, I am firmly behind this one and think that the evidence that is available goes waaaaaaay beyond simple conspiranoia and into the realms of hard truth...
I'm just waiting for conspiracy theorists to come up with the explanation that the grand dark advertising plot devised by scheming billionaires, right-wing politicians and shady companies to sway public opinion in favor of dangerous populism is just a concoction by evil liberals to hide their failings over losing the election, or something.

Things are going to get really interesting in the next few decades. Throwing away your Facebook account isn't going to save you. Every piece of news on the planet is going to be mutilated, obfuscated, and fabricated by machines with more processing power than any human mind that's ever existed. And the general moronic public is going to love it, if the last few years have taught us anything.
Next few decades? I've been reading through a lot of the excellent Guardian reporting on the subject, and bottom line is, we're already there. I don't agree with calling it moronic public on every account, though - I know you and me would like to think that we're not susceptible to targeted advertising, but we are. Because it's subtle.

Let's not forget that FB is in essence an advertising company, and gives you a free service because it can do such tremendously amazing things with our data for FB's customers. They have mastered the art of targeted advertising and content sharing. In fact it is their selling point to companies and political parties - that with their insight, they can arrange for campaigns to be personalized and have maximum reach and effect.

Now, targeted advertising isn't new as anyone who's ever done a Google search knows - research one product and you get stalked by the same advertisements on every page you visit.

I once sent a friend a link of a search to a bunch of wooden cabins I was looking at buying, something he wasn't interested in, yet the cabins still keep popping up on all his pages. And now that you know this, go and prank your friends.

But FB takes things a step further - it has identified users that have a high propensity to share. They're used as apostles of advertising, and they are therefore targeted more heavily because of their public reach - an ad leading to a page, a share button, a like - and because they have friends who trust their friends, users are more susceptible to believe there is value in what they share.

What companies like CA have found out is that the likes that people give correlate to seemingly unrelated personalities traits. That's big data for you - like a few innocent pages, articles or posts with FB and CA can tell you which way you lean politically, what your sexual orientation is, how you'd feel about certain social or environmental issues, et cetera. They can build a deep personal profile now from the shallowest of data, and with that knowledge, they can throw automated personalized ads at you that stir your inner demons and address your fears and hopes.

This is especially useful in political advertising. We usually don't click the ads, and there's nothing to buy. But at one point, we do vote based on opinions we have gradually formed, and the ads and shared content may have played a role. For example, I'm a secular humanist supporting female and LGBT rights, I'm very concerned over climate change and want to see the world move to renewable energy ASAP, I worry about escalating world-wide tensions, and I think education is key to advancing through all our challenges. And with that profile, boom - if I was using FB, ads from a certain political party would start appearing, spearheading exactly my concerns. They're the perfect match!

But the ads are generated to address my needs, and the same party may promise the next user something entirely different, possibly even contradictory. I may or may not find out, if I can be bothered to ever look beyond my FB pages.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
@Smarty: I said that the general moronic public would love it, not that they'd simply fall for it. Flying into frothing rages and forming tribes on Facebook over completely false stories. Like I said in my post, nobody is going to have any idea what's going on at all anymore soon if we don't create AI to counter this stuff, including the smartest of us. That's why I'm worried, haha. :p

I said a few decades, because I don't think the world is even going to be recognizable anymore by then. I agree that we've already started down that slope.
 
S

Smarty

Guest
Relevant:
... Aaaand mister Nix is out. Probably a futile effort at damage control. It's funny to hear the company statement saying that their CEO's remarks "do not reflect their values and their operations".

The CEO. Doesn't. Reflect. Those.
 
S

signal

Guest
Sorry but I get all of my political and scientific news from Facebook pages and only that because TV news sources are very biased. It enlightens me.
And where do you suppose Facebook gets their news from? Are you suggesting Facebook is impartial? Your news feed is tailored to reinforce your current beliefs and world views.

"A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa."
- Mark Zuckerberg
 
F

FROGANUS

Guest
also been reading up on this.. the CA scheme was already reported on a while back..

Funny how they're fussing about how CA got this data.. meantime, the DNC has already been using similar data to throw things their way using these same tactics at the same time with Hillary's campaign and back since Obama's elections.. Facebook is really owned by wallstreet, so they're cool with Trump (stocks are up), they would have been cool with Hillary, this is also why you're right, they wouldn't have been cool with Bernie. ;')
 
My life is a comedy, so I like action movies. So I am an action movie without realizing it? Why aren't there more explosions and car chases in my life?
 
S

Smarty

Guest
Funny how they're fussing about how CA got this data.. meantime, the DNC has already been using similar data to throw things their way using these same tactics at the same time with Hillary's campaign and back since Obama's elections..
There is a distinct difference. Obama's raise to power was indeed helped by focusing political campaigns on social media, most of all Facebook. This is not unusual, and in fact Facebook advertises with such political campaign outreach services. To FB, politics is just one of many products for which you can target specific groups in their user base.

CA takes it to a wholly different level - under the pretense of science they've harvested tens of millions accounts without approval (but also, without much protest) and then ran all sorts of analytics on them outside of the usual FB parameters, and were then able to pinpoint people in key districts (such as swing states) and target them with fully personalized ads - using a combination of straight out lies and custom-made key points in favor of the Republican party. In fact, they did the same for Brexit, and given the narrow win of the leave vote, it is almost beyond doubt that their operations have swung the British in favor of leaving the EU.

My life is a comedy, so I like action movies. So I am an action movie without realizing it? Why aren't there more explosions and car chases in my life?
There are, you just don't see them. You're too busy wearing sunglasses, looking cool while walking away from the car crashes and explosions happening behind your back.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
there are two real take away that can come from what has happened.

the first one is that as troubling as this might be, in the long run it will make people more skeptical.

skepticism is a virtue, most especially in regard to the values you assume you hold as evident. given the shear volume of information that exists you can find reason to justify any position you please and this becomes especially dangerous when people are unable to distinguish between their own thoughts, reasoning, and things that they accept that others have said that they have not critically examined. this lack of critical examination is, more than anything else, what causes so much damage, the people being targeted are able to be targeted because they are receptive to the persuasion put forward.

and here is the other take away

the fundamental axiom of all this targeting is based on the assumption that people seek out the things that they like. but if people use the internet to ask questions, and they ask many questions on a whole broad range of topics, the system doesnt know what to do.

sure it can make a guess, if you ask about coffee it will initially assume you want some starbucks, but if you start diving in then the label goes right out the window. are you looking for a specific compound in the coffee? a method of brewing? a genus, location or grower? are you trying to find coffee cups? maybe you are trying to remember something based off a recent smell that triggered a memory, by asking questions you are given multiple options and yet there is no certainty that the information provided is what you are looking for.

yes the system can guess based off the entire swath of information under the coffee theme, but if the next day you ask about carpentry, or platypus milk, or liver spots, or circuitry then the entire system falls apart in terms of precision targeting.

the point is that the only reason these kinds of things are able to happen is because we actively choose to allow them to happen by the choices that we make in how we use the technology, if we change our behavior so that we are more inquisitive and less deterministic then the only thing that can be done is to provide the best information possible so you can make your own choice, rather than being provided instant solutions in the form of coffee themed table coasters. :)

data mining would become useless overnight if you could not assume that the data had value to the person looking for it.
 
Top